


Brothers

by JiM



Category: Bourne Trilogy (Movies), RED (2010)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-17
Updated: 2011-01-17
Packaged: 2017-10-14 20:11:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/153008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JiM/pseuds/JiM
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a wise man that knows his own brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brothers

It’s been twenty-three years since he last heard that voice, but he recognizes it immediately.

 

“ _Vim_.  Will you meet me at the Irish bar on M Street in half an hour?”  The accent was heavier than he thought it would be but it was still him.

 

“I’ll be there,” Cooper says shortly into the phone – his office phone – and hangs up.  He doesn’t bother spending time wondering how his caller had Cooper’s own private office number. He just logs himself out and heads for M Street.

 

Cooper tries not to think on the way and is largely successful.  The trick to a rendezvous like this is to go in with no expectations, senses open to every nuance of the situation and not blinded by preconceived notions.  So says the playbook and so he believes – right up until he steps into the nearly empty faux Irish pub and sees his twin sitting in a booth in the back, staring into a glass of Guinness.

 

William Cooper is not prepared for the tangled rush of emotion he feels when those eyes, so much like his own, flick up to meet his.  Then he is standing beside the table, looking down and watching the other man struggle to his feet.  After a long, wordless moment spent staring, they are locked together, arms tight around one another.  He is murmuring, “Cyril, Cyril,” and hearing his own name whispered back at him.

 

Eventually, they get a grip on themselves and settle into the booth.  Cyril pushes the untouched glass of stout to the side and leans forward over the table.  His eyes are on Cooper, minutely flickering as he studies him.  Cooper is doing the same, staring at his brother and memorizing this new incarnation, noting all the changes from the weedy little twelve  year old boy he had last seen being led away by their father in a German airport. 

 

Life has not been kind to Cyril, he thinks, just as the other man says, “You look good.”

 

His English is heavily accented in a way it was not when they were ex-pat kids running around Berlin with their ragtag pack of friends from diplomatic, military and local families.  They had all spoken a kind of accentless local patois then, made up of English, Russian and German.  Now, he sounds Russian to the core, just as Cooper is unimpeachably American.

 

“CIA,” he says.

 

Cyril nods. “FSB,” then he grimaces. “I was.” 

 

He gestures to the scars Cooper has been cataloguing on his face, hand and the left side of his head.  Cooper has already noted the cheap cane propped beside the booth.  Cyril keeps his hair short, nearly a military buzz cut, and it does nothing to hide the scarring there or the slight mangling of his ear.

 

“What happened?”

 

A slight twist of the lips, nothing like the bright smile his brother used to flash without provocation.

 

“A piece of advice, my brother.  If your bosses send you after a rogue CIA agent named Jason Bourne, do not go.”

 

Cooper doesn’t know what expression is on his face, but whatever it is, it causes Cyril to push the forgotten glass of Guinness toward him.  He’s read the files on the whole Treadstone debacle.  He knows he’s good at wet work, one of the best. But the Treadstone operatives had been trained to be the kind of conveniently soulless and obedient assassins that were only one step up from zombies.  He had spent an instructive and chilling afternoon listening to old Henry down in Records.  Then he had intercepted a few files on their way down from Landy’s last mop up of yet another Bourne mess.  The beer is bitter and reassuring on his tongue and he drains half the glass before he is prepared to look at his twin.

 

“ _Kirill_ ,” he says, finally pronouncing his brother’s name the way their father did, as a good Russian would.  As a child, William had always resented that he had no Russian name; even then, he was his mother’s son and Cyril, his father’s.  Finally, he recognizes  who his brother is, who he has been.

 

Cyril’s eyes close as he nods once.  He is pale, still smudged under the eyes with the defeat that had nearly killed him.  Cooper had skimmed over the report of the assassination attempts in Goa and Moscow which did not note the fate of the hapless Russian agent.  Of course, that same man had killed at least one of Cooper’s colleagues in Berlin, part of the whole Abbott mess.  That man -  his brother.  Rage flashes through him, rooted deeply in the grief of their parents’ split, fed on the years of loneliness, watered with half-truths from their mother.

 

“You joined the _Cheka_ ,” he spits out suddenly in the border German of their childhood, all of their father’s fear and hatred of the Soviet secret police who held his life in their iron fist in his voice. That fear had strangled their family, then butchered it into two equal and miserable parts.

 

Something hot sparks in Cyril’s tired eyes and Cooper could almost be glad to see that ember of his brother still burning in this thin, maimed man.  But the sense of betrayal, foolish as it is, is still crashing through him.  All of his rational detachment, learned in hard schools through some tough years, has been torn away.

 

“The _Cheka_ is gone,” Cyril says.  “I joined the Army, then I was seconded.  I protected my country.”

 

“It’s the same bastards,” William Cooper says.  “New name, but the same old savages. The same ones who refuse to accept that the Cold War is over.”

 

And Cyril, the quiet twin, the one who would never use two words when one would do, says only,

 

“Treadstone.”

 

Cooper blinks, as breathless as if he had been punched in the solar plexus.  Cyril was always like that, he recalls now, going right to the heart of the argument.  Cyril is right; if the FSB had some old Cheka agents in it, so did the CIA have abominations like Treadstone.  Anger falls away suddenly, allowing Cooper to breathe again.

 

“What do you need?”

 

“Money.  Some place to live.  Something to do with my time.”

 

“You’re ‘retired’?”

 

Cyril nods and Cooper tries not to wince. His recent adventures with the retirees of his field have not left him unscathed.

 

“Any unfinished business likely to come after you?”

 

Cyril stares into the distance past Cooper’s shoulder.  “Possibly.  I was only made aware  of my ‘retirement’ when my car blew up.”

 

Thinking of Moses, Matheson and the others, Cooper says, “We might have made a miscalculation, going into the family business.”

 

Cyril’s smile is small but honest.  “Perhaps.  You have plans for when your time comes?”

 

Cooper nods. Meeting Moses and Boggs had taught him that.  One good, sound retirement plan and a host of fallback options.  He is still putting some in place, including the not-too-obvious cover plan he has allowed his bosses to discover.  No one will ever come near his family again and his children will never be separated as he and Cyril have been.

 

“Our mother…?”

 

“Dead,” Cooper says. “1996, lung cancer.”

 

“All those damned Galoises,” Cyril says.  Their childhood had been wrapped in a cloud of cigarette smoke; Marlboros in the States, then Galoises when she had gotten stationed in Berlin.

 

“Father?”  But Cooper knows the answer even as he asks the question.

 

“1995, cirrhosis.”

 

“All that damned vodka,” Cooper says.

 

“And aftershave, paint thinner, tank engine fuel, rotted potato peelings in the bathtub, for all I know.” 

 

Cyril’s voice finally shows the strain of their separate memories and, while a mean part of Cooper is glad that he is not the only one suffering, the rest of him remembers that the broken man sitting before him is his brother.

 

Without consciously making the decision, Cooper pulls out his wallet.  He slides a picture out from behind his driver’s license and pushes it across the table.

 

“My wife, Michelle. Jake is 6 and Tess is 3.”

 

Cyril looks at them for a long time, dressed in their Christmas best. One finger traces a corner edge again and again. 

 

“They are beautiful.”

 

When he pushes the photo back, Cooper hands him three credit cards.  “The max on each of these is about ten grand. Will that be enough?”

 

Cyril nods and stows them in a pocket without looking at them.

 

Cooper scribbles a phone number on the damp napkin from beneath the half glass of beer. 

 

“This man might be able to help you.”

 

Cyril looks at it intently for a moment, then crumples it up and drops the paper into the warm beer.  They both watch the ink dissolve before he asks, “Who is he?”

 

“Ivan Simanov,” and Cooper wants very much to smile at the way his brother’s pupils dilate in shock, but he does not.  “He owes me a favor.”

 

Which is not entirely true, but he thinks that Ivan will be just curious enough to see Cyril and hear his story.  He has a sincere dislike for the Moscow crowd that were involved in the Bourne debacle (ruined his brother, he thinks).  That alone will likely see Cyril installed in a plush dacha just to spite them all.

 

“If he can’t or won’t help, call me.”

 

Cyril shakes his head.  “It was dangerous enough just this time.”

 

“I can take care of myself.”

 

Cyril smiles briefly. “That, I know. But your wife and children…”

 

“I’ll clean up your backtrail, _Kir_ ,” he says softly in German. “It will be all right.  Promise.”

 

“ _Vim_ ,” Cyril’s voice is equally soft as he levers himself to his feet.  “ _Danke_.”

 

Cooper rises also and steps forward.  He hugs his brother tightly and whispers into his tattered left ear, “My right pocket.”

 

He barely feels his brother take his unregistered backup weapon and its loaded spare clip.  When they step back from one another, Cyril’s cane is in his hand.

 

“Give Ivan my best.”

 

Cyril nods, gives him a last long look, then limps from the bar, threading his way through the early lunch crowd that has begun to trickle in.  Cooper doesn’t watch him go. He drops a five on the table, nods to the barman and strides out.

 

Pausing on the sidewalk, he flips open his cell phone and calls Michelle.  He leaves a message on her voicemail asking her to get a sitter for the kids tonight because he wants to take her out to dinner.

 

He has a story to tell her.


End file.
